I've been using Cinnamon on Ubuntu 12.04 for sometime, but I thought I'd try it on Mint from the coverdisc. However when I boot in I do not seem to get Cinnamon, I get what i presume is Mate or whatever. I logout and select the Cinnamon session, but it still returns to what I had before. I am on a twin Monitor ATI Radeon type display, built into an ASUS MB.

I've installed under VB instead (using a downloaded image), and cinnamon comes up as required, however I can't find an ISO with all the DE's that the LXF ones has. Is the LXF ISO available for download somewhere?

You should be able to switch between DEs while running in live mode, as ajgreeny said. I've tested with with MATE, Cinnamon, KDE and Unity and all worked as expected. You should select the session after you have given the user name (mint) as changing user can reset the selection.

To use the DVD with a VM, you can use it directly as you discovered, or you can use the dvd2usb script to create an image file and then boot from that as an ISO. Booting fro an ISO image is much faster, so it can be worth the time it takes to create the image file.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

I should like to install LXF174’s Mega Mix Mint 15 in VirtualBox on my Mac mini (no optical drive) straight from an iso, ie from an iso on the hard drive, not from a usb stick. Page 111 of LXF156 refers to a script being provided on the DVDs to recreate the original iso and goes on to say:

It doesn’t work with all distros, but if the one you want has a mkiso.sh script in its directory on the DVD, you can make an ISO image. Copy the distro’s directory to your hard drive. Then run the script in a terminal. Either

will create WattOS.iso in the directory where you copied the WattOS folder.

How would I adapt this command to LXFDVD174 which has two Mint directories, Mint and mint15? The Mint directory contains a .mkiso file and a MakeISO file. The mint15 directory has seven directories (such as .disk, boot, install etc.) and four files.

Or, as mentioned further down on page 111 of LXF156, would the easiest thing be for me simply to let dvd2usb create an image file by running one of the following:

The makeiso.sh script is now called MakeISO but i have a feeling the one on LXF174 won't work (each script is customised to a particular distro so adapting another is non-trivial).

However the file that dvd2usb creates is an ISO image, it's a hybrid image that boots from optical or flash storage. Provided your Mac Mini (I thought that was part of a Happy Meal) can boot from an ISO on the hard disk, it will do it with a hybrid image too.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)

I had no problem using dvd2usb.sh to create a LXFDVD174.img file, which I did in Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop (which does have an optical drive). After renaming the file to LXFDVD174.iso I tried running it in Ubuntu's VirtualBox. The LXF DVD menu appeared and I was able to select the various distros. I didn't take it any further than this as I am short of space on my laptop and the whole idea was to install Mint in VirtualBox on my Mac mini (if it was part of a Happy Meal I think I'd rather have a Mac maxi, thank you!). All I wanted to do was to test the iso file was working.

Unfortunately where I ran into trouble was trying to find a way to transfer that 4.4GB iso across to my Mac. I attempted it with a 16GB usb stick but the copying failed with “Error splicing file: File too large.” The stick is formatted msdos and I think there may be a limit on the size of file which can be handled.

So I gave up and simply downloaded the Mate version of Mint from the Mint website and I have installed that to my Mac mini's VirtualBox. I had been quite looking forward to the multi-desktop version and it would have been good if I could have simply created an iso for Mint alone (instead of the whole DVD) which would probably have fitted on my usb stick. But unless anyone can give me step-by-step instructions for doing this using mkisofs as Mike did for me a few years ago for Fedora, that is a pleasure I shall have to forgo. I imagine the mkisofs command options, the significance of which I don't fully understand even though I have looked at the man page, must vary from distro to distro, and of course to start with you need to know which directories from the DVD to include.

Could this perhaps be a subject for a future tutorial in LXF? I'm sure I can't be the only one who would appreciate instruction in creating individual distro isos from the disc.

The file size is indeed the problem, 4GB is the limit for FAT. You have a couple of options, split the file and reassemble it on the Mac, or reformat the stick using a different filesystem, such as NTFS, exFAT or even ext2 if the Mac can handle it.

The other alternative is to copy the isolinux, Mint and mint directories to your hard drive, make them writeable and then you can run MakeISO from the copy

Once again, many thanks for your guidance which has proved invaluable.

I reformatted the usb stick as exFAT and this time the LXFDVD174.iso successfully copied across to it from Ubuntu's hard drive. However, I first had to do some research into how to get Ubuntu to mount the reformatted stick after getting an Error mounting: mount: unknown filesystem type 'exfat' message when I plugged it in. I discovered that all that was needed was the installation of fuse-exfat from the relan/exfat ppa.

However, as all I really wanted from the DVD was the multi-desktop Mint, I then turned my attention to copying the three directories you mention to my hard drive, making them writeable and running MakeISO as per your instructions. To quote a somewhat cliched expression, it worked like a charm! That iso too was copied onto the stick and I now have Mint Mega Mix running in VirtualBox on my Mac and am a happy bunny.